A large and detailed watercolour showing Ararat at the height of the gold rush: Roper's view captures the bustle and industry, while emphasizing the smaller vignette, as for example his thoughtful positioning of an Aboriginal group draped in what appear to be government-issue blankets in the centre-ground. Roper achieved what few of his contemporaries managed, to capture a real impression of what it must have been like to first come across a gold strike at the height of the wild initial fervour.

A large and detailed watercolour showing Ararat at the height of the gold rush: Roper's view captures the bustle and industry, while emphasizing the smaller vignette, as for example his thoughtful positioning of an Aboriginal group draped in what appear to be government-issue blankets in the centre-ground. Roper achieved what few of his contemporaries managed, to capture a real impression of what it must have been like to first come across a gold strike at the height of the wild initial fervour.

This superb Australian Goldfields scene is the original "on the spot" painting on which Roper based a large oil painting later in his career in London. That later work, presented to the State Library of New South Wales in 1929 by Sir William Dixson, has since become one of the most famous depictions of life on the goldfields. It seems that all of Roper's oils date from the 1880s or later (DAAO), after his return to England in 1873, which makes the present work painted on the spot some thirty years earlier an important link in understanding his process of artistic updating and revision.

The present work is signed and dated "1858" at lower left, the time of Roper's first visit to Australia. The picture has added significance because it is now revealed to have a series of substantial pencil notes by Roper on the back which provide details including the naming of specific individuals, and revealing that the original caption was "An Alluvial Diggings near Ararat, Victoria, 1858". These notes offer some important evidence for Roper's biography. They discuss a return visit to Ararat and are clearly dated "1873", a time when he was once more based in Victoria. They show him marvelling at the rapid transformation of Ararat from the rough-and-ready diggings to a town of real substance.

Edward Roper (1832-1909), a fine journeyman artist and lifelong world-traveller, first arrived in Victoria around 1857 and appears to have headed straight for the goldfields. He had a long and varied career as a writer, painter, photographer, and an experimenter with new forms of printing and illustration. He spent most of his early life in Australia and Canada, making his last confirmed visit to Victoria in the early 1870s, where he attempted to establish an engraving company on the new "graphotype" model in Melbourne; bankrupt by 1873, he returned to England. The central event of his career was his exhibition, at the Burlington Gallery, Old Bond Street, London, of some fifty works in oil and watercolours in 1886.

Of all his known works the Dixson/SLNSW painting has long been recognised as a small masterpiece of its kind, so to have rediscovered this original and hitherto unrecorded version, held by the Roper family until recently, is of great significance. Roper's later oil is closely based on the present work, from the Golden Age Hotel and Bowling Alley at left, through to the vast marquee of the Theatre Royal at the back, just to the right of the small copse of trees; with myriad diggers with everything from pans to cradles, cut trees with the bark stripped, stores including one flying the American flag, the middle ground is dominated by great ranks of broken soil and tiny figures, the landscape beyond still rather unmarked and with a real grandeur.

Many key details are changed in the later oil: the most obvious is the changed stance of the enigmatic man standing with a sweater around his neck at mid-scene, whom Roper adjusted to face the viewer, but there are a number of other curious smaller changes as well, such as altering the most prominent flag from a version of the Red Ensign (or "Red Duster") to the White Ensign with the cross of St. George, through to tiny adjustments such as altering the sign listing the gold price (£3.18.9 per ounce) to remove a reference to the price of flour.

Without doubt the most significant change is in the background, which in this original watercolour is rendered in such charming and minute detail that it is possible to discern the precise movements of literally scores of tiny figures.

This work by Roper is of great significance for understanding the actual appearance of any of the goldfields, and of course for Ararat itself. There had been some European settlement there in the 1840s, but it was only when a travelling caravan of Chinese diggers discovered gold in 1857 that the region exploded in population.

In this light, Roper's notes on the back of the painting are also significant for his comments on his return to Ararat in 1873. "This is now quite a town", he begins, and goes on to describe the new ornamental gardens where the diggings once were, the buildings of "cut stone", the daily mail coaches (and talk of a railway), and even the "Mullock Bank Hotel", run by a "Chinaman who has a China wife" (this must have been the respected hotelier Chung Mow Fung, who married Huish Huish in Ararat in 1858).

Ararat had been given its name by the pastoralist Horatio Wills (traversing the region in 1841 he wrote in his diary "for here, like the Ark, we rested").

In terms of the actual scene, the only even vaguely comparable view we have discovered of early Ararat is from a naïve unsigned sketchbook in the State Library of Victoria, which does at least share some details in terms of composition and date (notably the spread of tents, the flow of the land and the large number of felled trees). Of course, Von Guerard also worked in the region, although most of his known works are in the grand landscape style that he made his own. Roper certainly knew the region well, and at least two other genre works in the vicinity by him are known: 'Bringing the Wool, Mount Arrarar (sic) in the distance' and 'Chasing an Emu, plains near Ararat.'

Without doubt, this watercolour of the Ararat goldfields and the later oil of the same subject are Roper's most important Australian works.